LISA BOND
Biography
I was born in Ballyshannon, Co. Donegal in 1975 and was brought up in a very creative environment. My mother was a dressmaker and loved oil painting while my father in his spare time created detailed drawings, carpentry and metalwork. Art, music and dance was always encouraged, leading me to be involved in feis’s, orchestras and to spend hours in our attic studio painting. As a child I was fascinated by the impressionist painters and loved recreating Van Gogh’s paintings. Throughout my teenage years I worked with the artist and historian Mr. Luis Emerson in his studio and was grounded in the rules of drawing, human anatomy, portraiture and oil painting. However I also began to rebel against expectation of good art and I created exciting colourful abstact paintings containing thoughts that emerged while I was painting. This art process offered me freedom for creative expression and allowed me to experiment with a confident energy.
Consistent commission work throughout third level kept my work challenging and diverse. My career to date has centered on the arts. After completing a B.A. and Graduate Diploma, I taught art and music at secondary level as well as private commission work and facilitating art sessions to adults and children. I undertook courses in Art Therapy and have provided workshops to secondary schools and the Health Service Executive. I completed a series of works based on the theme of ‘Oppositions’. Rough verses smooth, is an opposition that I continue to explore visually, tactically and metaphorically and follows through in my current work. The series went on show at my first solo exhibition in 2007 resulting in each of the twenty works being sold on the opening night. Since then I have been working full-time as an artist from my studio in Letterkenny where I reside with my husband and two children. My work fills me with a sense of fulfillment and accomplishment. It is my responsive tool for expressing inner visions to outer realism resolving in images that are unique.
My current paintings’ explores human emotion, activity and environment. I am drawn to large scale boldness, strong colours and emphasise form as well as the separating, interweaving and tension points of positive or negative space. I like working with texture mediums that can be manipulated, they remind me of my mother icing cakes or my father applying cement to his many stone walls. These rough textures are inspired by the ruggedness of the Irish landscape, coastline and dried seaweed. I spent a lot of time as a child and worked as a lifeguard on the Donegal and Sligo beaches. Returning to the sea is a source of inspiration and gives me a sense of freedom essential to my creativity and expression as an artist. When working on an abstract piece I like to distort the scale and spatial arrangements of the physical elements seen in the landscape or nature, shapes and their relationships with each other, their movement and colour can take on an emotion or issue with each element or shape asserting its own identity. I modify the depth and contrast of colours in response to the textures and shapes suggested. I use my fingers and touch as a tool a lot because it connects me more with the paint, canvas and image. Once the piece is dry I often work on it more with oil bars, blending and adjusting colours and tensions until nothing annoys me in the image. This finally creates works that feature both spontaneous and conserved elements. My paintings are created to emphasise the positive in life and to shift the viewer to a place of calm and reassurance however the images can act as a catalyst that the observer almost automatically develops their own narrative.
My work can be viewed at exhibitions nationally, private and corporate collections nationally and internationally and in exhibitions with The NorthWest Artists Group. My work has recently been included in The OPW collection.
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